


No Kind Words Left, Love, for You

by WatchMyFavesSuffer



Category: Call Me By Your Name - All Media Types, Call Me by Your Name - André Aciman
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Banter, M/M, Romance, Slow Burn, ethnoreligious belonging, these two have a LOT of feelings, what am i even doing with these tags
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-22
Updated: 2019-10-08
Packaged: 2020-07-11 12:53:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 13,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19928374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WatchMyFavesSuffer/pseuds/WatchMyFavesSuffer
Summary: "Oliver had had sorrows, ones who's precise contours and dimensions were unknown to me. He had had joys, too, the enormity of which I wasn't sure I could fathom. They had changed him-- not necessarily for the worse, but still, I knew that even if total intimacy existed between us, familiarity no longer did."This is a mix of self-indulgence and stylistic study, essentially using Aciman's writing style to write an alternate ending to the book. In this version, Elio meets Oliver not in public, but in his home, and the two do the whole pining, dripping with sensuality, bantering with hidden meanings thing that they do so well.Title from Hozier's "Be"





	1. Familiarity

Oliver had had sorrows, ones who's precise contours and dimensions were unknown to me. He had had joys, too, the enormity of which I wasn't sure I could fathom. They had changed him-- not necessarily for the worse, but still, I knew that even if total intimacy existed between us, familiarity no longer did. His boys had been born and grown and learned and skinned their knees countless times without my being there, without my presence in his heart or the shadows of our evenings in his eyes. I panicked as I approached his door. I knew he would insist that I stay the night, though I didn't yet know if I would or could accept such an invitation. (But this was belied even as I thought it, by the toothbrush and change of shirt I had tucked into my bag.) 

_You no longer know him_ , I chided myself. _He is no longer the person with whom you shared all that was yours._ I gave myself a firm reminder, bordering on a rebuke. _Who's to say he'll feel anything at all?_

Then, he opened the door-- smiling. 

_Oliver smile_ , I thought. And there went my reminders, and my chiding, and my girding of my loins with the knowledge that he has been too many people, lived too many lives without me for me to ever catch up with him. _Oliver smile._ And, as I was overwhelmed and overjoyed to see, _Oliver Star of David_ , still gold against his gold skin, his shirt open and his skin tan despite the New England weather. 

Of _course_ I still knew him, as one Jew must know another. We were, after all, a nation dispersed, a people who had to learn to see and hear and know each other over miles, across seas. 

"It's me," I breathed. 

"Elio...Yes," Then, more insistently, "Yes. I got your e-mail. You will come in, won't you?" 

I had sent him an e-mail, informing him I would be in town, briefly, and he had responded with enthusiasm, that he wasn't teaching this week, so we would have to meet somewhere besides his office; was that alright? I had said of course it was, and he had forwarded his address, with the spare note "If you're not too busy." I could see now that he hadn't truly expected me to show up. 

"Elio Perlman," he said, wonder lifting his voice, as though he were introducing some esteemed expert who had come to speak to his undergrads. 

I gave a sarcastic little twirl, like a teenager showing off her prom dress, not only to silently say _that's me, in the flesh_ , but also to draw his eyes to my body and ask _Do you remember this? Remember that this body was once your home; more your body than mine?_

I realized then that the house was empty, and silent. It was grand, though lived-in, with wide expanses of hardwood floors, plenty of windows, a kitchen with a marble island in the center, everything smelling of the apple and cedar trees that lined his neighborhood. "Are your boys home?" I asked, half-hoping to see them, young men with easy smiles and overlong hair. Miniature Olivers, who would make me forget for a moment how late he had come into my life, and how little time we had left together. 

"No," he said gingerly. "They're out, with their mother. Let me take your coat." Did he not want me to know we had the house to ourselves? Out of fear of what I might do? Or what _he_ might? Or maybe that was not it at all. Maybe the very mention of his children, to whom I was sure he was a wonderful father, made him self-conscious, not wanting to bring the debauched world of his juvenile Italian fling into the sensible, solid life he had built for them. I handed him my coat, a slightly oversized camelhair I had taken from my father. 

"What are you doing in Massachusetts?" He asked as he hung my coat in a hall closet. 

"Job interview," I said. Then, off of his raised eyebrows: "Just a courtesy, really. I'm on tenure track, I have no real interest in moving." I wanted him to know I had no plans to invade _Oliver-land_ , as I had come to think of Massachusetts, like a demilitarized zone between the life I had and the life I had wanted for myself. 

"Well, Harvard would be lucky to have you." He said, conciliatory. 

"How do you know I meant Harvard?" I asked mischievously, both to counter his wan compliment and to invite him to joke with me, as freely as we had been by his spot in Heaven. 

"Elio Perlman, leave the comfort of the Ivies? Pro would _plotz_ where he stood." I loved the way he teased me, and loved even more hearing the casual way Yiddish slid into his sentences. 

He was right, of course; the interview was for an adjunct position at Harvard, and my father was thrilled. I grinned, ecstatic that he still saw into me --and through me-- so easily. 

"Do you want a drink?" He asked suddenly. Now it was my turn to raise my eyebrows, outwardly at the nervousness in his tone, but secretly surprised at the offer, knowing how a drink could easily be a precursor to something else entirely. 

"Sure. Can you still make a martini?" I asked. 

He laughed. _He_ _remembered_. 

"Two martinis, then." And, from the kitchen, thrown over his shoulder: "Please, _sit_. You're making me nervous." 

I sat on his overstuffed leather couch and waited as he mixed our drinks, humming absentmindedly. He was still beautiful, and barely looked a day older than when I first met him. He wore his hair a bit shorter now, though. And the way he hummed, the way he asked me to sit down-- there was something older about him now, and unmistakably paternal. It made me wonder what his father had been like, and it made me want to imagine my father when he was as young as me, waiting for a martini from the man who lit up his heart. 

He came back, two glasses in his hands. I immediately took a sip, and held it in my mouth, as I had held more precious parts of him before, refusing to swallow. The taste, as I had hoped it would, brought me back to that infinite night in Rome when he had mixed drinks for us all. 

We spoke a while, about his work and mine. He touched me with the small comments he made. They revealed, perhaps unconsciously, that he had read many of my papers; more, probably, than the people I had shared my bed with when I had written them. How a joke about Liszt I had put in a parenthetical reminded him of the sardonic way I had once mixed a song by George Michael with a Liszt variation on a Schubert lieder; or how he thought Vimini would have liked the way I spoke of this fantasia, or that fugue. I had kept tabs on his career, as well, but could not bear to read anything having to do with Heraclitus, by him or by others. 

At some point, I had allowed my feet to nestle between his. I hadn't removed my shoes, but his touch was still as heavenly as I remembered. He did not withdraw, perhaps recognizing that the gesture was most likely unconscious, or perhaps allowing me this small touch out of pity. I would take his pity, if it was all he had to give. I felt as besotted and helpless as when I would wait for him at the breakfast table in B., hoping against hope he would wake in time to eat with us before heading into town. I would readily take anything he had that was not yet spoken for. 

I had, I realized shamefully, been staring at his left hand. I tried to look at him, or at my drink, when he spoke, but found my gaze drifting to the gleam of white gold on his ring finger. I knew he was married, knew he had a family, but the ring still struck me as obtrusive, wrong. I wanted to strip the ring from his hand with my teeth and, having spit the offending metal onto the ground, suck his fingers, let him lay his thumb on my tongue. I ached for it, for something more personal than the feel of his toes through shoe leather. 

It had been half an hour by then, and still no mention of Italy. Had he truly been happy in B., as he had told me he was, or had he grown to regret what he had allowed his body to do? Did he no longer like who he had been when he was with me? I liked talking to him (I would always, always like talking to him) but I did not want to continue with chit-chat, or academic shop talk, or mothball-and-textbook _remember whens._

I was about to say something, probably some nonsense that meant nothing on its face but inside which lurked secret compartments, and inside those compartments more secret ones still, but I never got the chance. 

"Elio, I think you should know. My wife and I are separated." 


	2. Separation

“I’m—I’m sorry, Oliver.” I said reflexively. I wasn’t entirely sure I didn’t mean it. I hated anything that might cause him unhappiness. I thought of the time he let me top him, back in B., and how I’d wanted to hold his head to my chest and kiss his hair and protect him from the cruelty of the world beyond my room. 

“It’s not your fault,” he offered weakly in response. 

“Your boys, are they...?“

“They’re splitting the time between here and my sister-in-law’s, until we come up with something more final.”

Something more final. The vagueness of the phrase hid any lead as to how he felt. Did final mean the signing of divorce papers? Or his eventually winning her back? Or some other, businesslike arrangement between lovers who no longer had any passion for one another but needed to remain married for the kids, or for their taxes, or to have someone on their arm at faculty functions? 

“They’re handling the whole thing remarkably well.“ He added.

“They’re like their father, I’m sure.” Oliver, as I remembered him, was unflappable and confident, content with do-overs and setbacks and on mutually knowledgable terms with square one. 

He roared a short laugh. “My God, I hope not. For their sake. I would have been a basket case.” 

“You always seemed to have it all together, at least to me.” 

“Elio, it took me a week to work up the courage to give you a back rub! I was a mess.” He had, without realizing, broken the spell between us. Or rather, between the us that stood here now and the us that had stood on the villa’s lawn in Italy.

“That was the first time you touched me,” I said. Now we entered the part of the evening where I had to wrestle with my body, had to debate and rehash and relitigate the old arguments between what I wanted and what I feared. 

I had anticipated this feeling, but I had imagined it taking place around a dinner table with his wife, his children. I had expected us to exchange furtive glances as we gulped down red wine and fought the urge to flee to an upstairs bathroom and screw our brains out. Now I wouldn’t even have to bother with the stairs.

If I wanted him, I could most likely have him. Here, now, and with no more guilt than I had felt any other time I slept with him. He was, after all, separated. (‘Separated’ seemed to me an Americanism if I ever heard one. ‘Separated’ took away all euphemism, and, like his ‘Later!’, hit you with the uncourteous, blunted truth of what happens when two people are split. Were we separated, Oliver and I? Unceremoniously removed from one another, husband-wife from wife-husband?) Or maybe the issue wasn’t his wife; maybe he simply didn’t want  me . Knowing he was available to me, even if only technically, meant I had something to lose, and something to fear. It sent me right back to the day we met. Did I have it in me to return again to dropping hints and contriving reasons to be near him and, being near him, finding the most subtle way to let him know that I would give anything to find myself naked under the kindness of his gaze? 

“Did I ever dance with you? At— what was it? Le Danzig?”

I shook my head. “But you danced with Chiara.” 

“I wish you had been at my wedding,” he sighed. “The way I danced that night— God, I hadn’t had that much fun since college.” 

“I think I need another drink.” I replied.

He smiled wryly. “Sorry. You always made me feel old, but now I’m old  and alone, which has a way of making you nostalgic.” He sighed deeply. “I’ll get you another martini, if that’s actually what you want.” 

Was he implying that perhaps what I wanted wasn’t so much a drink as a fuck? No, I decided. No, he truly wanted to know what I wanted.  _Cared_ what I wanted. With the care a friend extends to another— while placing his lemonade glass next to his sheet music, or while biking alongside him, or while entering his body.

I offered him my glass, finding myself surprisingly emotional and unable to speak. 

When he returned, he sat not in the armchair where he had been sitting before, but on the ottoman across from me, too far for me to put my feet between his. 

I smiled to convey my thanks and drank, willing the alcohol to enter my system faster. 

“I’m happy you came to see me, you know.” He said. It sounded like  _do you have any idea how glad I am we slept together?_ ,  words that had sent me to another plane when I heard them.

“It felt wrong to pass through town without saying hello,” I said, trying to shrug off the earnestness in his tone. 

“I meant, I’m glad we got to see each other again. Before we’re old and gray.”

“You mean, before we’d wasted a whole life driving in circles?” It came out more sarcastic than I had intended it.“I didn’t— you know what I mean.” 

He winced, but nodded. He looked up at the clock on the wall behind him. “It’s getting late. What time is your interview?”

“Not until 10. But I should probably get on the road if I want to get a good night’s sleep.” I said, not quite closing the door to the option ofmy sleeping here or staying later, but giving him the chance to save face if he wanted me gone. 

“The boys’ rooms are empty. I don’t know if you have hotel reservations, but—“

“No. I should probably go. We both know what happens when we have adjoining bedrooms.” I knew I had teetered terribly close to the edge in saying that, but I couldn’t help it.

“Elio.” He said sternly, and I instantly regretted my lambent tone. 

He surprised me when, rather than a rebuke, he said: “When you go to your interview tomorrow, and they offer you the job— and I know they will— I want you to take it. If you want it, that is. I don’t want you to feel as though it were somehow off-limits to you.” 

He had obviously intuited the way I thought his state; as though it were a pet he had won in our divorce, something I could no longer lay any claim to. 

“Of course.” I murmured. I missed him reading my mind, and decoding the complex logic I used in all interactions with those I desired, and feared because of my desire. 

“Have a good night, Elio.” He said, standing to walk me to the door. 

As he retrieved my coat and handed it over, I knew it was a perfect opportunity to pull him to me.  _One kiss_ , I thought,  _for old times’ sake_.  I remembered how Oliver had kissed me, gently, on Monet’s berm, the first time: to say no, you haven’t imagined it, or mistaken it. what is between us is very real, but I don’t trust myself to follow it any further than this. I thought perhaps I could temper my kiss like him, let him know it was all in the name of old friendship, but still get to taste his mouth, his tongue, as sweet and wholesome and soft as I remembered them.

But then, without warning, I found I was putting on my coat. As if without my brain’s permission, much less its knowledge, my body was walking out the door. 

“Have a good night, Oliver.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so thrilled with all the kind comments and love I've gotten from you all; thank you for reading! I hope I live up to your love for these characters <3


	3. Sleep

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You guys get two chapters this week(!!) mostly to make up for how short and relatively anemic Chapter 3 is. Hope you enjoy.

I called a cab and had it drive me to a hotel. I checked in and hoped I would fall right asleep. Back in B., the worrying and waiting and resolving to do something soon to bring him closer had drained me, and ushered in sleep every afternoon of that summer. The night was not as merciful this time. Sleep eluded me, as though in retribution for letting me off so easy the first time.

The cab driver had taken me just seven miles, from his door to mine. I could run that distance, under the right circumstances. And I half-feared that I might. I also feared that the last glance I had caught of his face as I closed the door behind me would be my last in this life. I couldn’t bear to go back, I couldn’t bear to stay away. I was afraid I would fold and run to his side, and I was afraid I wouldn’t.

While I was anxious, the night hadn’t saddened me. It had made me aroused. The feel of his feet, the warmth radiating off of his hands as he handed me my coat, the way his broad chest heaved when he sighed, while his Star of David caught the light and glittered. As I touched myself, I tried to forget all about separations, and custody agreements, and the scent of apples. I wanted to take him back with me, if only in my mind, to the warmth and closeness of Italy, to lemon and apricot trees, and to the sound of Anchise’s hammer, rising and falling in the distance. When I came, it was not my hand, but his, that I felt stroking me. He was leaning over me, his hair brushing my face.

When my joy subsided, the anxiety came back, and a new sadness with it. Maybe to have seen him at all was a mistake. In my mind, he had remained drenched in the syrupy sun of chamomile-scented summer. How would he, and the delirious joy I had felt with him, survive outside of its native climate, in the wind and snow of a far-off land?

I remembered my father’s warning, not to cut him out of my heart in the hope of avoiding pain. Would he think it cowardly, how I treated his memory? How I wished to keep him in the perpetual past, only bringing him back to life when I was lonely at night and needed to conjure his memory, and to feel his cock, which was no longer his but ours, come inside of me? I had relegated Oliver to a photograph, hanging over a bed with nobody sleeping in it. I felt the old, warm shame come flooding back. I was ashamed of wanting him so badly, and of being so afraid to ask for what I wanted. But I was ashamed, too, for the way I was so possessive and secretive with my thoughts of him, how I cruelly refused to let the Oliver of my mind live and breathe a life apart from me and had placed him instead where the ravages of time and space could not affect him.

When I finally slept, I dreamed of a peach tree with two gnarled, diverging trunks.


	4. Messages

The following night, before it was time to check out of my room, I drafted an email (from my personal, instead of my university, address) to Oliver.

> “It was great seeing you. Please keep in touch. E.”

No, too casual. That would ring false.

> “I can’t tell you how good it was to see you again—“

Too trite.

> “It was wonderful to see you, and your home. If you’re ever in Connecticut, let me return the favor. Give the boys my love.”

Too presumptuous? Or too desperate?

I finally settled on something I hoped he would find inoffensive:

> “Dear Oliver, It was good to see you (and it was even better to have someone with whom to talk about the pre-Socratics again.) If you’re ever in New Haven and you need anything, anything at all, I’d love to help. Best, you know who.”

I had probably written more interesting thank you notes for my bar mitzvah, but at least I hadn’t tripped all over myself or made a desperate confession.

The interview had gone well— tragically, better than I had expected. Not only had he made clear the job was mine for the taking, the chair of the music department had heard about a proposal I had made that had been rejected at Yale— field research into the aesthetic ethnomusicology of Southern Italian traditional song— and was prepared to fund the project if I taught two years undergrad.

I realized I had wanted the interview to be a spectacular failure, so that I could return to Oliver, should I ever see him again, stoically resigned to the fact that fate had separated us. “It wasn’t meant to be,” this parallel version of me would sigh.

I hadn’t ever genuinely considered taking the job. But this news, and the permission Oliver had given me, changed the equation entirely. Now I had an altogether different set of decisions to make, and artifices to present, and motivations to obscure, in order to render myself and the small life I had built for myself safe from him. If I accepted the job now, despite having declared I had no intention of doing so, it would appear one night with him was enough to melt my resolve down to nothing. Or worse, it would seem I had taken his advice to consider taking the position as a scolding, and had scurried to do what he wanted. Or if I turned it down because I was afraid of seeming smitten, or childish, wasn’t that more childish still? The whole exercise made me feel ridiculous, and defeated, knowing that I would plan my life around someone I hadn’t touched in years.

I was surprised to find, on the train home, that Oliver had already answered my email. I had expected him to be too busy, or uninterested entirely in responding to my bland message. I clicked on it with anticipation mounting in my chest.

> “How’d it go??”

Casual, slapdash, American. Typical.

> “How did what go? -Y.K.W.”

I gnawed on my thumb nail as I hit send. Every one of my nerve endings prickled as I tried not to think of how I was trying not to think of whether or not he would answer. I busied myself with my new composition software, emptying my inbox, and all the other tasks that felt a life away from the thrum and rush of blood under my skin at the mention of his name.

> “The interview, you goose!” 

I wondered at his investment in my job prospects. Could he be trying to suss out my motivations in taking the interview? Or trying to sway my decision one way or the other? No, I decided. He was simply good, the best I had ever know, in fact, and had an uncomplicated desire to know how other’s felt. I wished I could relate. I, with the knotted and tied and tangled jumble of thoughts and motives I kept stitched in my heart.

I feared telling him it had gone well would make it seem I was giving myself cover in order to rush to his side with my dignity still intact; or else that it would provoke him to insist even more that I take the job. I knew I was weak, and that even the slightest push from him would lead me to upend my life in the barest hopes of rekindling what we had.

I wished I had someone in my life who would talk through this decision with me. My father would launch into a lecture about how I mustn’t refuse myself joy in the interest of protecting myself. My mother didn’t know enough about where things stood between me and our former houseguest to even have an opinion. One of my ex-lovers? Marzia, maybe? No, she was busy in France, and would be annoyed besides. I realized, to my horror, that the only person whom I wanted to talk to about Oliver was Oliver. _What should I do, Oliver?_ I wished to summon him, to invite him to visit me in my sleep that night, that I might dream of an answer.

> “I don’t know. It went well, maybe. How are you? And the kids?”

It was about as straightforward as I could force myself to be.

* * *

Finally, my train arrived in New Haven. I had office hours, then a painfully long departmental meeting. I was grateful for it, although it was a task so boring that it didn’t even qualify as drudgery, because it would mean an afternoon away from my computer and its promises of continued connection to him.

That night, after an interminable conversation with an undergrad (whom Oliver would have hated for the ham-fisted way he tried to telegraph his ease and comfort in intellectual debate, to obscure the areas where he was out of his depth. _Oh God_ , I lamented, _one night with Oliver and already everything you see reminds you of him?_ ) I returned to my apartment.

Elio books, Elio furniture, Elio clothes hanging in the closet. A solitary life, only occasionally visited by other men who sat on my couch and hung their shirts next to mine only because they loved someone named Elio, who’s home this happened to be, and who’s body happened to be my own. I envied Oliver’s taxes, and his kids’ bedrooms, and his tree-lined block. I even envied his separation, because it meant he had created a life so bound to another person’s that the severing of one from the other was difficult and painful.

I opened my laptop before I went to bed. 

> “I’m as well as can be expected. So are the boys. I would love for you to meet them. I would love for you to come back at all. There isn’t a dinner drudge in all of Massachusetts that doesn’t see me as Oliver, Professor of Philosophy and Ruiner of Marriages. I could use an ally.
> 
> I hope you’ll forgive me if this sounds as horribly selfish to you as it sounds in my mind, but I hope you’ll move here. There. I said it. I had wished to stay neutral, and not to sway your decision by making my feelings known, but I know myself. If I didn’t say it now, I’d say it later, after it was too late for either of us to do anything. Take the job or don’t, but at least now we both know. Best, an old friend.”


	5. Speak

The message stole the air from my lungs. I staggered to my desk, where I knew I had left a scrap of paper with the number of his office at Tufts. It was far too late for him to be in the office, but I needed to hear his voice, even if it was just a perfunctory “leave a message at the tone”. An automated message greeted me. Crushed, I dropped the receiver. I forced myself to take a deep breath, and it raked its way out of my throat as the old fire raged around me. Control yourself, Elio. He hadn’t said that he loved me, or wanted me, he had just asked me to be near to him. As a reminder that he had had a life before his marriage? Or, as he said, as an “ally” in a hostile world? Or perhaps he was lonely enough that any familiar face would do. Oh, Oliver, how readily I would be your ally, your second-in-command, the bodyguard to your heart, ready to take any bullet for you. Kiss my cheeks and find them already wet with tears I’ve shed for you.

In the morning, I called the department chair at Harvard. We made small talk for a few minutes. Did I know that their ethnomusicology lab had recently received more funding for better recording equipment? And had I read that new paper reinterpreting Beethoven’s “Eternal Beloved”?

Finally, he came out with it. “I’m hoping this call means you’re considering accepting the position?”

I placed my hand over the receiver for a moment, as though I feared I might cry out. I tried to breathe around the lump in my throat, which felt like a hot, dull slug of metal left over from enemy fire. I thought again of the youth of Italy, going to Piave to fight and returning, perhaps, to find that the men they loved had left the town and married and raised children without sending so much as a letter to the frontlines.

“Yes. Yes it does.”

I would start my new job in late August. I had hoped the intervening months would pass with minimum pain. I knew from a lifetime of waiting for summer vacations that it would only seem a long time if I fixated upon it. So, I hoped that I could let a thousand other matters steal my attention until one day, I would look up and find the day had come.

Nature had other plans. The summer scrolled out long and hot. I took up jogging, something I never did and which only sharpened the blade of my nostalgia. So I quit, and I sat around the house, the boundless silence only broken when I decided to play the upright piano tucked into a corner of my living room to pass the hours. Although I had been dying to tell Oliver about my choice the night I received his email, I never did. I had taken his not answering as a sign that I should keep it hidden from him. I knew this was superstition, and not particularly compelling superstition at that, but I still couldn’t convince myself that telling him was right. Yet if I showed up without warning, what would that signal to him? I hoped he would see it as an indication that the decision had nothing to do with him and so didn’t need to be announced to him. But I feared it would seem a presumptuous romantic gesture; something out of the end of a film, when the square-jawed protagonist impulsively hops a plane to be reunited with his lover.

As August stretched its burning arms out, I decided to tell him. _Speak or die._

I sent him an email— from my new Harvard address, so the news would be delivered by the message’s presence before he even opened it, and so whatever words I used, or fumbled around with, ultimately wouldn’t make much difference.

> Dear Princess,
> 
> “Is it better to speak or die?” I’ll see you in Boston, in my shining armor and ready to defend you from armies of belligerent Dinner Drudges.
> 
> Sincerely,  
> A young knight.

I was certain he would remember the story, but I also liked that the melodrama of it could hide anything I still felt about him in layers of irony and performance.

Did Oliver know how I felt? It’s possible that it was obvious to him that years and miles and other loves and lovers and side projects— because, ultimately, anything unrelated to that summer _was_ a side project— could not have erased what I felt for him, and it was perfectly plain to him that I still wanted him? But it might have been something other than want that still flourished in me— it might be simple curiosity to see the alternate life I might have lived with him, if— If what? If nature hadn’t added _one thing to my purpose nothing_? Or, if I had been braver? Gone to him sooner? Never stopped sending him letters in the first place? Driven to Boston and slept with him, marriage be damned?

Or maybe I just wanted to test what I felt. I hadn’t truly known what I wanted from him back then until I had kissed him in the berm, then felt his foot at the table during lunch. Maybe I needed another trial, another experiment, another test run.

What I knew for sure was that I wanted, and feared more than even my most carnal desires, was to be his friend. Because we had been friends once, and I wanted it again with a fervor that outpaced any lust I had ever felt. And because it was the least I could do to repay him for what he had given me. I owed him my allegiance; which meant, I realized, I owed him my self-control. I wasn’t 17 any more. I would speak, if only because it was preferable to dying, but I could mot make us more than what he wanted us to be. I would have to lay to rest whatever unruly desires still lived in me.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “nature...adding one thing to my purpose nothing” is a reference to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20. The poem concerns the male narrator’s desire to be with another man, thwarted by Mother Nature who, having fallen in love with the narrator’s lover, turned him into a man. The line is a double entendre, “nothing” being slang at the time for vagina.


	6. Boys

The bare articles that tallied up the sum of my life— my piano, my desk, my books, my favorite chair— were packed and taped and driven, in a truck that rattled like fish bones lodged in the throat of an unwary diner, to Boston. I was thankful for the myriad mundane tasks that would take up my first few days: picking up the key to my apartment, supervising the movers as they arranged my furniture, meeting the students for my first semester music history symposium. They would prevent me from analyzing, reframing, questioning and otherwise picking to pieces the implications of, and motives for, my move. I took comfort in the scenery as I drove around, completing my errands. The weather was a brisk prelude to fall; and the wet leaves, the crispness of the air, and the fog that wreathed the hills all seemed precisely formulated for me, to buoy my spirits even as fear threatened to crush me. 

I had dropped off a box of my things at my office and was trying to familiarize myself with the computer there when I saw a new email from Oliver. 

> Dear Knight,
> 
> I heard your ship came in. Since I know you haven’t unpacked a single pot or pan yet, come to dinner tomorrow. 7 o’clock, just you, me, and the boys. 
> 
> With forbidding candor,
> 
> A Princess.

I was grinning at his joke, his continuation of our little game, (not to mention that he knew that I, afraid as I was of change, would put off unpacking) before the full force of what he had offered hit me.  The boys.  His sons. Oliver sons, no doubt with Oliver wit, and nearly as old now as I was then. Wouldn’t they know? Wouldn’t they see, written plainly on the faces of men who are too old to dissemble any longer, what had happened between us? How could I cross one leg over the other without thinking of that leg, wrapped around Oliver on the via Santa Maria dell’Anima all those years ago? I would probably get a nosebleed, or cry, or beg them for forgiveness for how I had jeopardized their existence, and how I still held a secret, cruel wish that he had never married their mother.

I knew, though I was nervous, that I had to take the invitation. He had given me the most precious parts of himself that summer, and here he was, doing it again. His children,  _cor cordiuum_ , the product of his love and the sum of the best parts of himself. By inviting me to dine with them, I knew he was also inviting me into the years I had missed with him. To meet his family and get a glimpse into his life would be an honor greater than any teaching position at any university on Heaven or Earth. 

I had no energy to play around with words, or to hide how I felt. I was too humbled and happy at being invited to hide it. So I simply wrote back:

> Dear Oliver,
> 
> I would be honored.
> 
> Elio

How to pass the time between now and 7 tomorrow,  _zwischen immer und nie_ ,  between my life as it stood, and what it might become when Oliver was not a ghost but a regular presence? I knew I could not make myself take interest in the roster of freshmen I would be teaching, or in meeting my new colleagues, or in hanging my sweaters in the closet just-so. I didn’t bother connecting my phone, though I knew my friends back in Connecticut were expecting updates. Instead, I went to the store and inspected their peaches, bringing each to my nose and inhaling; wishing it were not a peach but his bathing suit, not his bathing suit but  _him_ , and not him but some magical potion that could rewind the clock these nearly-twenty years. 

The following morning, I made the perfunctory calls to friends and colleagues to tell them that I had gotten settled in and that all was well. I left a message for my father. I played Bach at my piano, just the way Back wrote it, no reinterpretation, no placing it in another’s hands, as though Oliver could hear me playing what he’d requested not just across the city but across the years. When the cadenza ended, I busied myself looking for a specialty grocery store in town. I didn’t want to show up empty handed.

* * *

“Good God, you’re actually here!” Oliver cried when he answered the door. He grabbed my shoulders as though holding me down so I couldn’t fly away as he looked at me. His eyes searched my face, my beard, the glint of my Star of David. “Come in, come in!” 

“Something for your boys.” I said, handing over a gift wrapped glass bottle. He tore off the paper. 

“Apricot juice.” He beamed at me.

“And something for the adults,” I said, defusing the intensity of his stare by reaching into my messenger bag and producing another bottle. 

“Neapolitan wine,” I offered by way of an explanation, in case he did not recognize the stuff, dark red and heady and tasting of Mafalda’s hometown, which he used to drink standing up in the kitchen. 

He nodded, staring engrossedly at the wine, its crumbling old cork. “Thank you, Elio.” He said it in a tone so suddenly solemn that it made me wonder if my gift said something more about me than I had realized. 

“Noah, Isaac! Company’s here,” he called up the stairs, not bothering to make more than cursory gestures at actually mounting them and retrieving the boys from their rooms. The easy rhythm of family life made me ache, not to mention the fact that he had given them Jewish names. 

And clattering down the stairs came two young men who, while not exactly mini-Olivers, made me feel as though I had come home, as though they had slept every night in a bed with a tree growing through it so they could never budge from this spot where I could come find them. Noah was 16, and Isaac 13. Noah was, I realized soon enough, a yellow bathing suit day, witty and jocular and verbose, but with barbs that I knew he could turn against me in a second. Isaac, who spent his afternoons preparing for his bar mitzvah before heading home and reading the _Decameron_ in his room, was far more blue bathing suit, even-keeled and mild, with his dad’s luminous eyes and sunburned shoulders. 

“Noah, Isaac, this is Professor Elio Perlman. He’s a very old friend, and I lived with him when I was in Italy.” 

For want of anything better to do, I waved. 

“Hi, Professor Perlman.” Isaac said awkwardly.

“Call me Elio.” 


	7. Venus

We sat down to dinner, which was _tortellini in brodo di cappone_ , fresh bread, and plenty of wine. It was like being back in B. No, that’s not quite true. B., which was the only place I had ever called home, in no small part because it was the only place where I’d had him, had faded into a vision weathered and worn by time and heavy rains. This was better than B., because here was not just Oliver, but the next generation of Olivers, and the promise of generations to come. These young men, carried with them not only the promise that what was his could never die, _must_ never die, but also carried more of me inside them than they could ever know.

I thanked him for inviting me, and thanked him again for making Italian food, as though he had anticipated I would be homesick upon seeing him.

Oliver grinned and asked the boys if they knew the other name tortellini had in Italy. Isaac shook his head.

I smiled. “ _Ombelico_. It means navel-shaped. Legend has it, in the 1500s, an innkeeper from Modena looked through the keyhole of one of his rooms to see the goddess Venus. Awed by the beauty of her belly button, he rushed home to invent the tortellini.”

“Yeah, but that’s probably not a contemporaneous legend, right? It’s just as likely that tortellini’s shape is meant to mimic Modena’s architecture.” Noah, who clearly was not one to leave the last word to anyone else, suppressed a smile as he challenged at me. His hair was slightly too long, and I had the sudden urge to tousle it. I had never felt so domestic in all my life.

Isaac, clearly acutely aware that his brother’s lighthearted intellectual challenges could turn to all-out hostility, piped up. “Did you know there were ancient Greeks who believed that looking at your belly button was a kind of meditation? It was called omphaloskepsis.” He looked down at his fork. “Well... _you_ probably knew that, dad. But did you know that, Elio?”

“Elio knows just about everything. Well, you probably know more than him about football. But that’s probably all.” Oliver interceded on my behalf.

I could scarcely hide my smile behind my wine glass. I loved them. I loved him with them. I loved who he was around them, even though it scared me to think he could be so different around anyone.

 _I know nothing, Oliver. But nothing._ I thought, but not morosely. Instead, I felt that if there was anything in this world worth knowing, it existed in this home and therefore was now open to me.

It was, incidentally, also taking every bit of my carefully cultivated self-control not to seek his foot out, or let my hand wander under the table until it found some part of him, or to excuse myself to the bathroom in the desperate hope that one of his bathing suits would be hanging on the shower rod.

After dinner was cake, chocolate with raspberries, and I wondered if he remembered that was the very thing we ate the day I got my nosebleed. I felt certain it couldn’t be a coincidence, but was unsure what it meant. Was it a chummy joke? A subtle jab? Another attempt at assuaging my homesickness? Or just the opposite— an attempt at stoking the flames of my nostalgia? Or was I, as usual, reading far too much into a gesture that meant far too little? Oliver had built a life, raised two extraordinary sons, married (and yes, _separated_ from) a woman I had never met, much less understood in terms of what she meant to him. He had better things to do than to worry about what significance his dessert had to a man he had once screwed for a few weeks.

I knew I was being uncharitable with myself, and self-pitying to an extent, but also knew that I had to preemptively imagine the worst in order to rob the inevitable rejection of its sting.

After cake, Oliver led me into the kitchen. Waiting on the counter were two shot glasses. “It’s grappa.”

“When did you become more Italian than me?” I joked, but accepted the drink.

I held my drink aloft for a toast. “To goddesses and innkeepers.”

He laughed and we threw our drinks back.

“Noah’s really something, huh?” I could tell he wasn’t trying to provoke polite compliments, but was genuinely in awe of his children.

“They’re both spectacular. Maybe a bit too much like their father— but there are worse things.”

“How did they get so smart? They might even be smarter than you. I mean, _omphaloskepsis_!” He shook his head in wonder.

He broke the pleasant, tipsy silence between us. “I know how that innkeeper felt, you know.”

“Pardon?”

“Forget pasta, I could have invented entire _cuisines_ based on the shape of your belly button.” He was grinning an Oliver grin, his _you just rhymed_ or _get back to your plunking_ smile. He was flirting.

“Back then, you mean.”

“Back then, I mean.” He parroted back. He was, I realized, a bit more drunk than I had thought.

We returned to the living room, and after much discussion of Isaac’s favorite poets, and Noah’s joking about his schoolmates, I forced myself to leave.

“I’d better get to unpacking right away, or else I’ll put it off until next summer vacation. I know myself.” I added, borrowing his phrase to tease him.Although, in reality, I didn’t know myself, and that was the trouble. I had no idea what to expect from myself as I swam in these unfamiliar waters, where I might say or do anything, might be anyone. Nonetheless, it felt good to say the phrase, to take it from his mouth into mine.

“Let us put you in a cab, then.” He had seen it before me: that I was too drunk— and perhaps too emotional— to drive.

“Alright. I’ll be back to pick up my car in the morning.”

“Well, have a good night.”

“Good night, Elio!” Isaac called from the living room, where he was showing Noah his newest Game Boy-related triumph.

“Yeah, good night Professor.” Noah echoed.

“Good night. Thank you so much for inviting me. I’ve— I had a good time tonight.” I stumbled, because what I had wanted to say was _I’ve been happy here._


	8. Night

That night, I dreamed of him. Not of his body or his kiss or his _you’ll kill me if you stop_ , but of him cooking tortellini, of keyholes and his tongue around the skin of my belly button. Wasn’t there a character in Ovid who became pasta dough under his lovers’ hands?

The dream unsettled me, not because of how ready my body was to yield to him, even after my firm resolutions to remain a platonic friend and supporter; but how, if I was eager to be shaped by his hands, I would need to be ready for the inevitability of the knife.

I had forgotten how the periods of sunshine between us always ushered in long, moonless nights, when I hated him for making me feel so powerless, and hated myself for finding any selfish, cruel corner of my heart that was capable of hating him. I felt suddenly betrayed, as though he had purposefully allowed me a glimpse of what life with him might have been like, before cruelly slamming the door in my face.

But how could I resent him for having such power over me when I had willingly given it to him, and would never in my life trade what he had given me to have that power back? I hated him for a much simpler reason: for loving someone else. For having two kids with her, kids I could never bring myself to hate despite the fact that their very existence was proof of his having had a life without me. For forcing me to be his friend when what I really wanted was so much bigger and yet so much simpler than that. I wished he had spent the last two decades stranded on an island in the Mediterranean, his skin clay-colored from sun, just waiting for me to pass by on my way from B. to N., as my father had always promised we would sail.

Of course, I too had known and loved and considered settling down with others, but I had never created any arrangement permanent enough that it would forbid his seamless reentry into my life. Had I done it on purpose? Had I lived a life so thoroughly unmoored that it could just as easily be a mirage, a lengthy dream back in the hazy, hot afternoons of that summer, all the while waiting for him to wake me with a kiss? Had I put my life in neutral, only to be angry that he had refused to do the same?

I didn’t e-mail him in the morning, I offered no more than pleasantries as I picked up my car where I’d left it in his driveway. I discovered I had lost none of my talent for pretending to be unaware of his existence.

“G'morning.” I said, pretending to look past him to the newspaper that lay open on the table.

“Right. The car.” He said, seemingly unbothered by my disinterest.

“Thanks for the cab ride.”

“Yeah, no problem. Later”

 _Why didn’t you wait? Why couldn’t you wait for me, Oliver?_ I thought as I fought the urge to look over my shoulder at him. I knew that I was being a child, acting younger even than when I first met him, and that it wasn’t fair to him to expect him to have sleepwalked through his days until I came sauntering back.

 _Control yourself, Elio._ It was not my voice but the voice of my grandfather that admonished me, that asked me _Did you learn nothing from the first time_? Oliver had given me one summer of surreal joy, perilous joy. _Look what it’s cost you. Don’t go there Elio. Not again._ I had traded any hope of building a permanent life, a life where I didn’t have to fumble around with strangers and myself, and I had traded these things for nothing but the skin of his arms and a lifetime of trying to relive what was already done, already a relic, abandoned to the tumbling dryer of time.

I entered my first semester at Harvard peeved and on edge. Oliver and I didn’t speak for weeks. Oliver clearly hadn’t lost his ability to show me how utterly dispensable I was, how I could enter his life or exit it, whichever, take your pick, because he could always be okay with himself.


	9. Serve

It was around the close of the first semester when he contacted me again and gave me all the proof I needed that I was still utterly incapable of resisting him, and by extension, of resisting the reckless demands of my own body.

> Isaac is demanding another dinner with you. The boys miss you horribly. I fear mutiny if we don’t act soon. My place or yours?
> 
> For you, in silence no more,
> 
> Oliver

Though I wanted to answer right away, I waited until later that day. The ice between us hadn't entirely thawed, and I felt the need to retain some air of nonchalance. I wrote:

> Dear Oliver,
> 
> Yours. Sunday, 5:00?

_(Yours_ was the way he would offer a peach, or a stray tennis ball, now being bounced from him to me and then from me back to him, much like a tennis ball. The game of it amused me. And, because he remembered _for you, in silence_ , and to show him I could take a joke and was hardly attached to my melodramatic inscription, I flipped it on him:)

> For you, in chatter and noise, somewhere in New England at the beginning of the millennium.
> 
> Elio

Dinner: I brought gifts for the boys, Oliver cooked Korean food, (I had no idea he knew anything about Korean food, but his _sunbudu jigae_ was surprisingly delicious. _Please, let him have learned this before we met, let him have told me about it back then and let me have somehow forgotten._ I didn’t want to see evidence that he had been places, learned things, loved things that I didn’t understand and had no idea about, when I was just a train ride away and could have shared them if I’d had the courage.) and I got absolutely thrashed by Isaac in Dance Dance Revolution while Oliver and Noah attempted to hide their laughter. I was so happy I could barely breathe.

Happiness with him was always tainted with the knowledge that what we had in Italy in the mid-1980s could never be repeated or revisited, would always be unmatched in its perfection. It couldn’t be erased either, though at times I was sure that I would gladly erase it if given the chance, so every other bliss I felt wouldn’t be so pale, so wan, so small on comparison.

Oliver didn’t drink this time, and I sensed he might have regretted what he’d said last time, _entire cuisines_ and the shape of my navel and whatnot. I hoped he hadn’t thought that was the reason for my thorny silence these past few weeks. I couldn’t believe that he could ever think that expressing desire for me, past or present, was crossing some sort of line. As if his desire weren’t the sharpest, brightest point of light in every sky I’d ever see.

Oliver did the dishes, a task he refused to let me help with, and I sat on the couch with Noah, who was nearly done with Wittgenstein’s _Tractatus_ and was gesticulating as he marveled at the configuration of the philosopher’s thoughts. Isaac, who almost certainly had no idea what was happening, stared raptly at the two of us from where he sat cross-legged on the ottoman.

Oliver emerged, spots of water turning his blue pinstripe button-down transparent in places, a dishrag tossed over his shoulder, sleeves bunched around his elbows. He looked for all the world like the archetype of a father, something enduring shining within him the way it often shone in my father when he smiled at me. “Alright, little scholars, time for bed. Isaac, no reading under the blankets, you have a world history test tomorrow.”

Isaac stood up, grumbling. “I was listening to Elio!”

“Elio will be back. Now, say good night.”

_Elio will be back._

Isaac, who was clearly sleepy but trying to hide it, hugged me. “G’night.”

I froze, overwhelmed. I looked at Oliver as if to say _help me._ He just raised a wry eyebrow, and I regained my footing and returned the hug. “Good night, Isaac. I’ll see you soon, okay?”

“Good night, Pro.” Noah said, offering a rare smile as he waved me off.

Dinner with the family became a regular occurrence, one so miraculous I was always surprised when an invitation landed in my inbox. I inferred, from what little the boys would say, that things were not headed in a good direction between Oliver and their mother. (Isaac complained about leaving his sneakers at “mom’s” which implied she had moved out of her sister’s apartment and had her own place, Noah’s lips tightened every time Isaac mentioned her.)

Oliver never spoke about her around me, and I never pressed him, even when he met me after lectures and we stayed out well into the night, drinking. We also barely spoke of B., and I got the sense that he wouldn’t bring it up unless I somehow indicated I wanted him to. Was he nervous that I would take it as a sign that he still had feelings for me? _Did_ he still have feelings for me? Or, and I knew this was too much to hope for, did he feel no urgency in talking about it, because now that we were friends we had a lifetime to hash out and investigate everything that had happened between us?

We spoke instead about Harvard, and my students there, and his students at Tufts. We talked about books, and Leopardi, and concerts that were coming through town. He asked me if I was seeing anyone, in a way that reminded me less of my endless questioning about Chiara and more of my father’s oft-repeated sermons on getting out more and making more friends. It touched me, and made me slightly sheepish to say that there wasn’t anybody. I didn’t ask if he was seeing anyone, but not due to any triumph of restraint on my part— I was simply sure that if he was, I would know. I would smell it on him, sickening sweet and tangible as peach pulp.

It wasn’t until he said it that I realized I’d been waiting for it. “She served me with divorce papers this morning.”


	10. Knowledge

I nearly dropped the receiver. “I’m sorry Oliver.” 

“It’s not like I didn’t see it coming.” He sounded weary, if not necessarily sad. 

“Have you told the boys?”

“No. Oh, God, I have to tell them, don’t I? That’s something I should do, right?” His tone was quickly pivoting from resigned stoicism to complete panic. 

“Well, at some point, yes.”

“Elio—“ He broke off as though suddenly breathless. 

“Do you want me to come over?” I asked, not knowing what else to offer. I tried to speak with an offhand air, to dispel any sense of premeditation or opportunism. The last thing I wanted was to seem like I was using his personal tragedy as an opening to get him to fuck me. 

“No, I have to get out of the house.”If I _had_ been propositioning him, that would have been as clear of a rejection as possible. “My complexion is becoming conspicuously close to the color of the wallpaper.” He added, less a joke and more a consolation.

“Right. You should go for a jog, take your mind off things. Call if you—“

“No, Elio, wait. Can I—can I come over to your place?” He had never been to my apartment. Except for that first night, we had only ever met in public places, or always had plenty of witnesses, like rival gang members trying to ensure a peaceful meeting. 

“Of course.”

After I gave him my address and hung up the phone, I paced around the house aimlessly. I made a quick, abortive attempt at cleaning up, then chastised myself for my immediate transformation into a housewife at the prospect of his company. Besides, he never kept his place particularly tidy. Back in B., his room— which had been my room and became mine again through him— had been messy, and more lived-in than when it was only mine. So instead of tidying, I lit a cigarette and forced myself to be still.  It doesn’t mean anything, he’s just coming here so he doesn’t have to be alone.  Yet, as I checked the clock, I realized that the time was inching toward midnight.

* * *

“Sorry if I’m keeping you up.” He raked his hand through his hair, though whether it was a gesture of anguish at his circumstances or anxiety at having shown up here, I couldn’t tell. 

I shrugged, and while I meant for my shrug to convey that I kept late hours anyway, I knew it also meant that he was free to keep me or wake me any hour of any day as long as we both shall live.

“Do you want a drink?” 

“Beer, if you have it.” He looked around at the living room as if unsure where to sit.

“ _Che Americano_ !” I cried with mock-anguish. 

“Gin, then.” He smiled softly. 

I poured us each a drink and sat on my favorite chair, prompting him to sit on the couch. 

“How are you doing?” 

He raked his hand through his hair again. 

“Sorry. That’s a stupid question.” 

He looked at me from under his eyelashes. “How about you? You okay?” 

“Me okay.” I answered quietly. 

He sighed and extended his long legs. “Good, good.” he said vaguely. 

I didn’t know if he realized it, but his feet were practically on top of mine, which were bare and craving his like I had craved so few things in life. 

I had no idea how to make him feel better. Without the sun and the trees of our home—yes, I finally said it,  ours — or the possibility of giving my body to his, I had nothing to offer. 

“I know some pretty good lawyers. If-if that helps.”

“Thank you, Elio, but we’ll probably go through a mediator. Keep things—amicable. God, ‘amicable’. You never hear that word used by anyone but divorcés. It means you don’t care enough to hate each other. How do you know someone and then simply... not know someone? Does it make any sense to you, Elio? Because it makes no sense to me. But then, you’ve always known more than me.”

I had nothing, no experience in my life permanent enough to compare to what he now faced.  _I know nothing._

No, that wasn’t quite true. I knew that there is a law written somewhere that those who truly know each other must never and could never cease to know each other. Anyone who had revealed himself fully to me, no matter if it was in a dream, or in a life so many years ago it might as well be a dream, must surely be exactly who he was then. 

I didn’t know if his wife truly knew him, or if he had just been driving in circles for nearly two decades. But I knew  him,  and knew that he knew me. I couldn’t imagine a world where anything so bland as “amicable” had anything to do with him and I, any more than I could imagine a person who didn’t care enough about him to be angry. I had felt everything worth feeling because of him.

But, because I still had no idea how to talk about the things that truly matter, I said nothing. 

Instead, I bent down and removed his shoes. He looked at me curiously, but the sadness seemed to have lifted from his face. I stripped off his socks and then eased on to the couch next to him. I caressed his foot with mine. His eyebrows raised. 

_I do not want passion, do not want pleasure, do not want proof..._ I repeated it like a mantra as I leaned in and closed the space between our mouths. 


	11. Entrance

With my feet still caressing his, I kissed him. He opened his mouth against mine, most likely out of instinct, and I licked the wholesome, soft inside of his lower lip. I was not doing this for my sake, or to appease the way my body ached for his. I was doing this because I knew no other way to tell him that love doesn’t die, that it simply hides itself in time and disguises itself with distance until we find the daring to seek it out. If I’d had the words, I might have said “If there is any truth in true love, it exists here, for you.” But I hadn’t the words, had only my body which, if I let it, could say far more than any speech I’d prepared hours in advance.

I did not allow myself to get lost in the kiss. Instead, like an ascetic testing his resolve, I met my desire halfway but no further, and threw all I had into telling him what I wished to say. Yet, no sooner than his tongue entered my mouth did I regret what I had done. I had invited him back in and in so doing, given him the power to destroy me entirely. Again. What if he hated this? What if he hated me? What if I had destroyed every bit of goodwill and easy friendship between us with one moment of stupidity? And if I had, I couldn’t even run away, because we were in my apartment. In fact, I would have to watch him leave me, a sight I promised myself, and my ancestors, and G-d in Heaven on high to never again behold.

I let him decide when our kiss ended, knowing I could never live it down if I tried to lengthen our kiss or encourage matters to progress. When he broke away, I shifted my body from his and fought the urge to lick the taste of him from my lips. I tucked my legs under myself and cast my gaze to the ground. I realized later I probably looked, with my reddened mouth and splayed limbs and guilty gaze, like a Catholic schoolgirl bearing a chiding for impropriety from the monsignor.

When I worked up the courage to look at him, he looked stunned. “Elio—“

“I should walk you out. The lock gets stuck sometimes.” I couldn’t bear to hear him admonish me, or worse, try to let me down gently.

I walked, barefoot, down the carpeted stairs of my building, feeling like I was mounting a scaffold. I imagined some Puritan adulterer making the same walk, nearly 400 years earlier, on the very piece of ground where I now stood. My mind focused on spinning this melodramatic vignette, which bought me time, a precious few minutes to see him out before despair inevitably overtook me.

“Good night. Sorry about everything.” I meant his divorce, but I immediately cringed, realizing how my apology drew attention to what I had just tried and how guilty I felt.

“Yeah,” he said vaguely, and turned away.

 _What did I just do?_ I thought of the kiss on the berm, my muddled confession on the piazzetta. I had been young then, and when I feared he hated me, I had been able to mourn for what could have been with a detached, remote gaze. What I felt was more than shame: it was fear, like I thought he might phone my mother and tell her what I’d done. An even more chilling thought came to me: what if I could never again see Noah and Isaac? And if they asked why Professor Perlman never cam for dinner anymore, would he feel obliged to tell them?

Oh, but that _kiss._ And his feet, maybe not as soft as I remembered, but just as lovely and pink. How could someone who probably wanted nothing to do with me be so vulnerable, so open beneath my touch?

I wanted to take a long, long nap, and hopefully wake up old and gray and beyond caring about the foibles of young men and their past and present lovers.

Before I got a chance to curl up in bed, the front door buzzer bleated. I groaned aloud. Has I invited someone over and forgotten him the moment Oliver called? It felt an eternity since this morning, and I may very well have asked some teacher’s assistant or adjunct back to my apartment. I buzzed them in without speaking.

When the knock arrived at my door, I forced myself to look cheerful, or at least not dejected. I opened the door.

“Oliver,” I gasped.

He didn’t speak, just removed his coat and kissed me.

* * *

I didn’t allow myself to think— I wrapped my arms around his neck and kissed back. I felt like a falsely accused man on hearing his innocence pronounced; I simply collapsed in desperate relief, falling into him and letting him lift me. I wrapped my legs around him, probably looking more like a child than I would have liked. He started walking through my apartment, with me still wrapped around him. He suddenly stopped and pulled away.

“Which way is your room?” he asked.

I laughed. “Second door on the right.”

He carried me to my room as I nestled into him and kissed his neck. He laid me down on my bed. I immediately started to remove my clothes, remembering how much I loved being lain bare beneath him.

He grabbed my wrist. “Wait, Elio. I need you to know that I understand what you were trying to do. And I know— I always knew, I just wasn’t paying attention.” 

He wasn’t making any sense, yet I knew what he meant. “I know, Oliver. I know.” I said, and started to remove my clothes again. Then I set to work unbuttoning his pants, all the while murmuring _I know, Oliver, I know._

How I’d loved and missed his cock, his bare shoulders, the line of muscle and tendon on his hip that flexed as he entered me, the way he bit his lip as I pushed my hips up, driving him further inside.

His ragged breath and mine, I exhaled and he inhaled, every breath feeing like the first I had ever taken, or like the first breath on my own after I’d been on life support for years and years.

“Oliver...”

“Elio.”


	12. Rememberance

We lay in my bed, hands intertwined, staring at the ceiling. 

“I have to pick the kids up from their mother’s.” He made no move to get up. He had pulled his underwear back on before falling asleep, while I was completely nude. 

“Don’t go,” I said. My voice was small, more a whine than a request.

“Don’t tempt me. I’ll stay here all day.”

“No, no. You’re right, go get the kids. Tell them I say hi.”

He suddenly flipped onto his side to face me. “I’ll do you one better: move in with me.” 

I’d never heard him sound so conspiratorial. I had a sudden image of him fourteen years old and plotting misadventures at sleepovers.

I laughed. “I can’t move in with you, Oliver. Not  right now .”

“What ‘right now’?I’m willing to wait until you’ve packed up your apartment.”

“Very funny. I meant not while the boys still live there. When they leave for college, maybe.” 

Maybe, meaning  _I haven’t the heart to say yes but could never say no_ _._ Meaning _a_ s _k me again and see how I’ll fold, because after all these years, I am still utterly incapable of resisting you._

“The boys are crazy about you, Elio.”

“But I’m not their mother,” I said sadly. 

He was undeterred. “What’s the difference? You were the one I dreamed of when I dreamed of being something more than myself.” 

“Can I ask you something that will probably hurt terribly?”

“Always.”

“Do you love her?”

“No.”

“Did you ever?” 

“I suppose I did. The way you feel something in a dream. It felt very real while I was in it. And when it’s over— Well, it’s not that you can’t remember how it felt. It just—slips away from you.”

By which he meant  _I have woken up now_. 

I have woken up too, Oliver, and though I dreamed many years had passed, in reality it was just yesterday when I last had you. Oh, to fall asleep knowing I had him, and to wake up knowing I still did! To never have to count the minutes we had left, or to worry precisely because I hadn’t counted them, because then the final day would hurt all the more. 

“Please, Elio. If you don’t want to live with me, that’s fine. But don’t turn down a lonely man’s plea for company because you’re afraid. That’s the worst kind of sin.” 

G-d damn him, he knew I was defenseless against this. Still, I bit my lip and stared at the ceiling to keep from saying yes. 

In a final effort, he reached over to me and gently turned my face to his. 

“Oliver,” he whispered against my cheek. 

“Elio,” 

“Oliver,” he was practically moaning. 

I stared at him.

“I knew it. You remember everything.” 


	13. Chapter 13

After I turned him down a final time, Oliver left to pick up his sons. I went to the office, though I didn’t have a class that day. I knew I had to force myself to leave, or else I would have spent the day naked in bed, poring over my sheets for any signs of his presence. Less with the erotic fervor that I had once brought to his swim trunks, and more to prove to myself that I hadn’t imagined the whole thing. He had been here just hours before, in my home, in my bed, and in my body.  _He had called me by his name and I had called him by mine_ _._ To have him twice in one lifetime was much more than I ever dared hope for. 

I read and reread my freshman seminar’s term papers, leaving long, detailed comments. I couldn’t and wouldn’t let my pen stop moving for fear of where my mind might stray. 

Had I broken his heart with my refusal? Sid he hate me? I couldn’t stand the thought that I had the capacity to hurt him, but I also knew I was right to turn him down. It was too sudden, too different, too strange a situation to thrust on Noah and Isaac. A man they had barely just met, suddenly living with them? Surely, if I moved in, there could be no pretending I was Uncle Elio, Friend Of The Family. I would be sleeping in the same bed as Oliver; they would have to know we were lovers. What if they hated me? Not just for taking the place of their mother, but for having the audacity to sleep beside another man, to wake up beside him and put on one of his shirts while I make coffee in the morning, to hum and make pancakes like a housewife? Maybe the kids would be fine with it, but what about our neighbors? Our coworkers? 

But I knew I could be okay with any amount of scorn, could be okay with the bitterest derision, so long as he was beside me. So long as he was okay with the world and unafraid to be with me, I had nothing to fear, because the only thing I’ve ever truly feared was a world without him. 

But what if it just wasn’t the same? We love once, and once only in this life. Every time after feels like a scale replica, a cunning impression of the first. What was between us was still intoxicating and rapturous; he still had the ability to make me like myself and the world I lived in, and that is no small feat. Yet, with so much time lost, so many versions of me dead and gone before he’d ever glimpsed them, our love could no longer be  _effortless_ . It could no longer consume me totally. 

I couldn’t move in with him because every day I woke up in his home, I would mourn for all the moments we had sacrificed. If I sat  _shiva_ for each lost day, I would never again see the sun. 

I could put it off no longer. I called Oliver. Voicemail. “I couldn’t stand it if you were angry with me. The truth is, if I wanted to live with you, I would have to cut out many pieces of my heart just to survive it. Because if I have to fee the weight of what could have been every day, I would prefer to feel nothing at all. And I don’t want to feel nothing. I hope you can understand, and I hope we can still have dinner tonight.“ 

He sent an email back:

> Come over. You’re cooking. I need something your hands have touched tonight, as a balm for my pain. 
> 
> With love,
> 
> Your Elio

I didn’t know if he had continued our name swap as a sign of his love or as a way to hurt me. I didn’t care. 

I bought some groceries and headed over. Isaac greeted me enthusiastically.

“What are you making us, Professor?”

“Matzoh ball soup and noodle kugel.” 

Healing food, for the heart of my ailing lover. 

After I had set to work in the kitchen, Noah came in and stood beside me as the pot bubbled. He was silent for a time, and then, as though sensing the moment might shatter and his chance to speak might slip away, he asked. 

“Are you and my dad— Did you two have an affair in Italy?”

There it was. No time for diversions, or half-truths. He deserved to know. 

“I was 17. It was no affair. A first love.” I stirred and stirred, looking down at the broth to avoid meeting his gaze. 

“If you were 17, he was 24. He met my mother when he was 21.” He tried to keep his tone neutral, avoiding accusation. 

“They were...on again, off again. The day he told me they were getting married, it came as a surprise to us both. That might have been the worst day of my life.” I looked up at him. “But she gave him you, and Isaac. I could never be angry about that.”

“Are you— are you two  _together_ again?”

I sighed. I put down the wooden spoon and leaned against the wall. I spoke very quietly.

“I think we might be. He asked me to move in this morning.” 

“And you said no.” Then, by way of explanation: “He was so sad today.” 

“I told him I had no intention of upsetting your lives. Not so soon after your parents split up.”

“Isaac wouldn’t care. He thinks you’re the coolest person on Earth.”

“Let’s see how that image changes when I’m bringing brownies to his debate team bake sale.” 

“Listen, I’m not exactly ready to call you Mommy, but he loves you. Like, cartoon-hearts-for-eyes loves you. And I don’t want go through his things after he’s gone and find nothing truthful besides some old postcards and a copy of  _ Armance _ .“

* * *

“Isaac, be careful with that chair!” Oliver called. Isaac was attempting to hold an office chair aloft, despite it being larger than him. 

“Let your brother get it. You can help me with these boxes.” I eased the chair down and handed him a carton full of papers. 

“Where should I put them?” 

“Oh, I hadn’t thought about that. I suppose your father and I will use the same study.” 

“Sharing an office. You really traded down.” Noah said as he tried to maneuver the dolly with my piano on it. 

“Don’t be a smartass, Noah.” Oliver called.

“Elio has the right to know that living with you is horrible. We pray nightly for a different father, Professor. Get out while you can.”

“You’re hilarious. Now get that chair inside.”

With both the kids focused on getting the chair through the doorway, I turned to Oliver and stole a kiss. 


End file.
